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Let the Night In

Shut the night out or let it in,it is a cat on the wrong side of the doorwhichever side it is on. A black thingwith its implacable face.—P.K. Page, from “Autumn”

Let us go to the moon, he says.Such a relief to stand on that alwaysdarkened face, cratered imperfectcousin, beautiful sphere flyinginto the celestial darkness.We tire of the earth-tides, the salt-pullon your bodies. But these vampires—they often talk like that, as if everystatement came from a tipped top hatand poetic frock coat, a white-shirted gleam.Shut the night out or let it in, you wonder.

Make your mind up, invite him in to stay,or firm your heart and doorto closing. It’s hard—when no oneelse has known you, and your houseis empty even when you are there.But then comes this thing, this strangeness,with his lack of breath, his words stolenfrom centuries, the cool handsthat you have let slip insidebecause you yourself have always beena cat on the wrong side of the door.

The moon, he says, let us fly there,build our own dark cities on its unseenface, rest in its comforting shadow.You think of travelling, awayfrom the shopping malls and parades,the smell of fried eggs, all the tickertape soulsthat crowd you out of your own headand you think, yes, let us go to the moon,sail to its restful silence on a starlightspaceship, restore this collapsed novainside you, this black thing.

We could go to the moon, he smiles,I would always be awake; no sun could reachthose craters, nor our city with its owndark cool heart. He has been charmed by the fairytale of physics in this century, the clearvoices from between the stars. Hush—he laysyou, bitten, down. The moon, like you,is turning, its silvered breath stops,curves to crimson joy, grave-fresh wakening.Your eyes open—the moon and he both wait,each with its implacable face.

October Country

as ever, for dear Mr. Bradbury

Those children who are born to autumndo not suffer spring, nor its greening glance.Our shuttered eyes abjure the flotsamjoy of the petal storm, the pale presenceof purple-buttered thistle or clover honeyspread over summer’s deranged-yellow heat.We slip from the frozen grasp of winter’s cunny,that pan-cracked, brittle, ice-slippered sweet,deny the ceaseless renewal, the so-called graceof each sorry songbird’s piercing April hymn,and return to autumn’s apple-fired embrace,its red-leaf-feathered, burnished golden limbs—escaping winter, spring and summer’s treasons,forswearing that tyranny of marching seasons.

Roc

We are come late to the love of birdsfor we are come late to love.

Before we had been nothing:a fossilized egg, a tired metaphor, old as mutton.

Now, the sharp twinge of middle ageand we are caught in love’s punctured balloon.

Its banana peel sobriety.Furred epithet, feathered lash.

We are come late to the mythology of love,the beefheart stain of the great winged roc

upon the ground of our imaginings,soft like the centres of certain candies.

Soft like the quilted centres of our beds,our quivering bird organs.

Give us the sweeping shadow,down from the mountains of Araby.

Give us the claws that catchus from the desert path, swoop us,

fat white sheep in the meadow,into that prickled nest, high, up high.

Black as Bees

You are black as bees,dark as the spine of a prison tower.Your mouth opens—nightfalls from it like a scythe.

You stitch me into the ground.Needle me with the rainof your disappointments.You’re a crow, trappedunder the weightof your own feathers.

You’re the snapping cur,the winding constrictor,the hole that never fills.

Cleaning House

It’s these household rages that do me in,fret me into a guitar-plucked hum,a dissonance of dishes, roasting chickensclucked quick into the oven, their crumb-tossed, butter-paled bodies dimpling in glass pans,heated caskets ready for the cremationof Sunday dinner and the Monday dance,the weekly pirouette of desperation.There I am, humped in a chair by the windowin some nameless café, swallowing teaby the styrofoam cupful, fat with sorrowand dulled by a relentless certainty:This clutching life, it ever groundward bends us,makes us routine’s hostage; how watchfully it tends us.

The Bloody Chamber

for Angela Carter

These are the stories we tell ourselveswhen the birds have fallen silent.We tell ourselves that we have not seenthe dismembered bodies of our sisters.

We tell ourselves that the key never fit,the egg remained clean, we were never touchedby the sorcerer at the door.We say that doorways are safe, the entrance to our homeis clear, that the border between earthand dirt has never been blurred.

But here’s the truth:

The sorcerer is always at the door,a terrible magician whose close attentionwill make you go limp.He might tell you differently, but he has alwaysbeen there, with his basket—a one-way trip to a strange marriage-bed,a house of gold roomsa skull in the windowwreathed with flowers.

But no girl ever asked, even whentarred with honey and feathers:What was inside Bluebeard’s egg?Another key? A universe? A kiss?What lies still in that ultimate womb-room?Perhaps it’s just a bird. The beginnings of a bird,the idea of a bird hatched from a fairy tale.

Perhaps love need not be murder,the price of knowledge, not deathnor the dismemberment of siblings,not the bloodied chamber,but the clean, unbroken ovoidof elliptical time.

Let us abandon eggs. Let us abandonkeys and locked rooms and stainedhearts and mattresses.

Let us go into memoryand marriage without fear.

The Soft Key

for Ursula K. Le Guin,who taught me to love the written word

(i)

Still the socks and spoons, the hollow rattleof domestication; hush husbands to bed,churn daughters toward their rooms, the battleunending as the pages tick-turn in your head.Still their voices, their terrible beloved voices,entangling the shoelaces and the heart-valves;daily life become molasses-dream slow, no choicebut to grit and grimace while longing for a salveto soothe the gnawing landlocked beast insidethat strains and leaps toward solitary joy—the balm of books, each a gloried ridethrough a strange world—a key, a beacon, a buoy.

See? Here is freedom, strange as irregularknitting. The other side of the wall is staticwith bald poets, wry madmen and bizarrewomen flapping their arms in the attic.Compasses whirl past north and back again.Roads take or don’t take, forests fly through spaceand the islands are beset by dragons.Dragons! Each gold-flickered eye, each traceof translucent wing, a saw or song to the heart.Is this the key, then? The door unclicked and swungopen, the oracle with her lips apart?Or is it shut? Oiled and locked and the last bell rung?

Open the door, close the door, no matter—the key turns both ways, toward before and after.

(iii)

A flock of thoughts curves down the horizon:you back at your kitchen window, congealedas a waxen effigy amongst the pans,your head full of the latest invented world.Foxgloves dip and foxpaws pad in the gloaming;the hums and haws of crickets haven’t quitebegun, nor the varied voices combingthrough the house. For now, a slow respite,time enough for keys to soften doorways,to lie between the clean white leaves of books,spoon and nibble dappled words and grazeon chapters caught without net or hook.

Let pages turn as they may and locks come undone;Let one world unravel, as another’s begun.